When Rep. John Lewis said he was voting for the bill, someone yelled, "Baby killer."

Later, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn said that he heard from Lewis that another protestor later called him the N-word. A Lewis staffer confirmed that Lewis had been the target of that slur.

Clyburn decried that language to a group of reporters after President Barack Obama spoke to House Democrats.

“I heard people saying things today I have not heard since March 15, 1960, when I was marching to try to get off the back of the bus,” Clyburn said, responding to a question about epithets uttered at his colleagues. “It was shocking to me.”

Cyburn said that he had also engaged with a few conservative hecklers, and told one of them: “‘I’m the hardest person in the world to intimidate.’ So they better go somewhere else.”

Pivoting to the thousands of protesters there to register their opposition to the health bill, Clyburn painted them broadly as a reactionary force, and the bill as an extension of other movements to grant basic rights:

“Well, a lot of us have been saying (for) a long time that much of this, much of this, is not about health care at all, and I think a lot of those people today demonstrated that this is not about health care,” he said. “It’s about trying to extend a basic fundamental right to people who are less powerful.”

A spokesman for Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) issued a statement Saturday evening confirming earlier second-hand reports that the Congressman had been spit on, and again equating the health care bill with the civil rights movement:

“For many of the members of the CBC, like John Lewis and Emanuel Cleaver who worked in the civil rights movement, and for Mr. Frank who has struggled in the cause of equality, this is not the first time they have been spit on during turbulent times.